An apparatus of and a method are known from DE 196 25 842 A1. As in the case of the known apparatus and the known method, the data in different modalities come from various medical appliances which record image data for medical diagnosis, in particular.
The image data are transmitted on the basis of the industrial standard DICOM and stored. The data are processed, in particular the medical data are conditioned for the graphical user interface, by applications which have been adapted to suit the various modalities. In the case of the known method and the known apparatus, the applications communicate with one another and read and write data on the basis of the DICOM standard using service modules which are designed on the basis of the OCX standard. These service modules are linked to the application at the time of design.
A drawback of the known apparatus and of the known method is that various service modules frequently need to be used for various applications. In addition, the assemblies for the service modules, which are frequently in the form of “DLLs”, need to be present at runtime in the same form as for the implementation. Otherwise, the application threatens to become unstable.
Respective application-specific service components for each application are therefore frequently linked to the application and installed together with the application. When the application is executed, the respective service modules linked to the application must be loaded into the computer's main memory together with the application. In addition, new service modules also need to be installed with each new version of the application. If this is not done, this sometimes results in the application being unstable.
EP 1 037 142 A2 also discloses an apparatus and a method in which service modules are additionally configured for an application by appropriate entries in a configuration file. The service modules additionally configured for the application are loaded at the time of loading in line with the entries in the configuration file and are made available to the application.